I'm shattered!

I don't know who worked harder in our lesson with Sonia this morning but I've been asleep all afternoon! Boy has she upped the ante on the effort she wants us to put in. Either that, or she felt a bit sadistic this morning :-)

The key point of the lesson is something that will now make it a bit difficult to describe what we actually did. She says that to turn him into an advanced dressage horse he now needs two things. The first is more bend and suppleness, more on that later. The second is to move rapidly from one thing to another without losing his balance or his concentration. The balance is the easier bit!

So we warmed up with flying changes and did some more later as well. They were solid to start with, then the later ones we threw at him straight out of another exercise without giving him any warning. They were either not on the aid, late or early, or a stride late either behind or in front. But when we tried a third lot later, they were pretty good.

To increase his bend and suppleness she had us do a travers with as much bend as we could get in it. We weren't focussing at all on how many tracks we were on, just trying to get him to bend BOTH ends of his body inwards while still jumping forwards in the trot. Begarrah that was tough and we must do more of it at home.

In canter we circled on two tracks. A 10m circle with the front feet and a 9m circle with the back ones. At this point, I feel like I'm working like a boilerman on the Flying Scotsman. When he's got the circle, we circle out maintaining the bounce. This is when Sonia suddenly dropped in a flying change instruction.

In the trot work it was slower to nearly piaffe, faster, shoulder in, travers, half pass, never even half a side without changing something. This method of training is so different from the "run of the mill trainers" I have been to, who want to see you trot a lovely balanced 20m circle in a rythmn and are happy with that. That's not what Sonia is after at all, especially not for Jazz. She said today that she had deliberately chosen to challenge him for the last year, because she felt that the approach of waiting for him to settle to be "ready" for the next movement was a)not necessary for him physically and b) not at all the right thing for his overactive mind. She's right of course, if we had waited for him to trot a perfectly submissive circle in trot before we asked him to try half pass, he'd still be chucking his overactive head around on that circle now!

I think she is a little chuffed that he has proved her approach right by his rapid progress. Now I can see where we go next, and I'm raring to get there!

C